Reception: August 18, 5:30-7:30
Please note that the opening reception for Darren Vigil Gray is on Friday of Indian Market Weekend rather than on the start date for this exhibition.
Contact: Diane Kell, 505.988.8997
LewAllen Contemporary
129 West Palace Avenue
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501
Santa Fe, NM – Named a leading member of the third generation of modernist Native American painters, Darren Vigil Gray has come into his prime as one of the most widely appreciated Native artists in the country.
Jonathan Batkin, Director of the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, has called him one of “the most innovative and influential living Native American artists.” In the catalogue for Vigil Gray’s 20-year solo retrospective at the Wheelwright, titled Counterclockwise, critic Lucy Lippard wrote that “For all his profound bonds to nature, Apache culture, and to the northern New Mexico landscape, Gray has found his true place in the act of painting, in brushstrokes informed by dreams and visions that transcend the personal and the local.”
Instincts Keep Me Running Like A Deer, an exhibition of Vigil Gray’s recently completed oil and acrylic paintings and monotypes, will be on view at LewAllen Contemporary from August 4 through September 4, 2006. A reception in celebration of the opening is scheduled for Friday, August 18, the start of Santa Fe’s Indian Market weekend.
Vigil Gray chose the title for the exhibition because he believes it describes his situation well. To explain, he says, “The Native aspect of my being is in constant flux. There is still the need and desire to comprehend the two worlds in which I live. I am connected both spiritually and psychically to the earth [while] modern man opposes nature and attempts to overthrow it. There is more and more madness on our planet. It is akin to an insane inheritance handed down. What more could an artist ask for to comment on?”
Still, he says, “My culture sustains and nurtures me in the most gentle and positive way. Like the deer, I have an absolute faith and reliance on the natural world. Like my ancestors who came before me, I prefer to approach my art with wild abandonment, free-wheeling nature and spontaneous activity.” Moreover, he says, “The oral history of my ancestors remains full of inspiration to create my most secretive and shadowy paintings. These paintings remain a mystery to me, even after I believe they are complete.”
With expressive color and energetic brushwork, Vigil Gray’s landscape paintings depict the Jicarilla Apache reservation and its environs as beautiful, wild vistas of canyons, mountains and river valleys. Far from being strictly literal, they are powerful expressions of Vigil Gray’s notion of the primal energy that resides in the land of his ancestors. His dreamscapes and figure paintings are bold, edgy and contemporary while being packed with apparently mythic symbols that spring as much from his mind as from his Native heritage.
Raised on the Jicarilla Apache reservation in northern New Mexico, Vigil Gray left the reservation at age 15 to attend the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. His work is in many prominent collections including those of the Wheelwright, the Smithsonian Institution, the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Denver Art Museum, the Gilcrease Art Museum in Tulsa, and the Museum of the American West in Idaho. His solo retrospective at the Wheelwright in 2002-2003 filled every gallery of the museum and represents an extraordinary acknowledgement of the importance, even at a relatively young age, of this unique artist and his work.
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LewAllen Contemporary is open 9:30-5:30 Monday through Thursday, 9:30-6:30 Friday and Saturday, and 11:00-5:00 Sunday. Darren Vigil Gray’s Instincts Keep Me Running Like A Deer will begin Friday, August 4, and continue through Monday, September 4. The opening reception for the exhibition will be held on Friday, August 18, of Indian Market Weekend. For further information please contact Diane Kell at (505) 988-8997 or [email protected].
